London

Throwback Thursday: London 2010, to see Pearl Jam, a soccer game and my friends D+D (very much ready to return the hospitality!). The last two rows are from a trip southwest to see Monkey World and Lulworth Cove in Dorset.

(As for the title: I’m not Betty, neither am I from London, we just role-played like that in the 5th grade when we started to learn English.)

Four years ago I went to London for several good reasons, such as D. and PJ, but also to watch the ever important South Africa 2010 world championships match Slovenia : England on their turf.

The day before the match, the steward on my (British) flight said “Let the best team win” in the cockiest way possible and I imagined him looking straight at me in my Union fan hat.

As I got there, newspapers wrote about knowing their enemy and published the national anthem to sing along.

We were watching the game in a “Slovenian” pub that serves (the wrong) Slovenian beer, and there were ambassadors, journalists, cameras, photographers.

This photographer…

…took this picture. Thank you. Photo of the rest: MM

My friend was interviewed.

It was tense.

Who didn’t drink was definitely not Slovenian.

We were the interesting ones, not the ones on the screen.

As it was, and this is from memory, we were doing just fine and then Rooney did something that appeared as if he’d been fouled, the referee gifted England a penalty kick and they won 1:0. To make matters worse, in the other game in our group USA scored against Algeria in the last possible moment, which meant that USA was in the next round and Slovenia was out.

The beer was gone and Slovenia was out.

Anxious Slovenian fans

Mick McCarthy has good taste in goalkeepers.

And so just earlier I check the Mundial 2014 schedule for today, and here it is, Italy : England, at midnight, and I tell my amore, ha! He’s your problem now!

You can buy a floor tile with your name on at the Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The bigger the donation, the bigger the tile. John Cleese bought one for himself and a bigger one for Michael Palin, under one condition: they had to spell Michael’s last name wrong: it now forever says Michael Pallin.